‘A Growing Necessity for Canada’: W.L. Morton’s Centenary Series and the Forms of National History, 1955–80

The Canadian Centenary Series was the largest collaborative effort in the twentieth century to write the history of Canada. The article focuses on the early evolution, form, and content of this collection, with particular emphasis on executive editor W.L. Morton’s own volume The Critical Years: The Union of British North America, 1857–1873, published in 1964. Envisioning the series as a national epic that would culminate in Canada’s centennial year of 1967, Morton sought to emphasize the European and northern character of Canada as counterpoint to the perceived Americanization of Canadian culture and historical studies in the 1950s. The difficulty of achieving the desired synthesis emerged early in the correspondence between the editor and his writers, especially Marcel Trudel, who insisted that Quebec’s history should not be subsumed under the narrative of the Canadian nation-state. The differences evident in these exchanges were echoed by Morton’s own evolving views. Where previously he had advanced regional perspectives as an alternative to the centralizing imperative, by the mid-1950s he opted for a pan-Canadian nationalism as essential to maintaining the integrity of the nation-state and its history. With the appearance of further challenges posed by Quebec separatism in the early 1960s, he responded by imposing a heightened unity on his own topic of Canada in the Confederation era. By situating Morton’s narrative strategies for The Critical Years and the Centenary Series within their specific contexts of time and place, this article displays the process by which one version of ‘national history’ has been constructed.